Display "before" when (for example) a birth date is entered as "before 1853"
Person Ernest Purdy (LZP8-N42) has a father Samuel Purdy and a mother Mary. The birthdate of Samuel is "before 1853" and the birthdate of Mary is "before 1856". However, on the "Family Members" section for Ernest Purdy, his parents are displayed with birth years "1853" and "1856", respectively. This is confusing at best and probably leads to many errors in this collaborative environment.
If the birth year were prefixed with "before" or some meaningful symbol, errors may be averted.
Comments
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I think you will find it is customary in all displays of birth and death that when abbreviations of approximation are used to indicate the event occurred either before, about, or after a specific date, the year is what is displayed. When you look at Family Members , this is even the case even when day and month of the date are known.
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Unfortunately, there are no generally-agreed-upon symbols for "before", "after", and "about", but I and many others agree that abbreviated displays shouldn't just drop the modifier.
The problem is not unique to FamilySearch; many websites solve it by simply not allowing modifiers, which makes it easy on their end, but not so much on ours.
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As illustrated, it appears even worse when viewed away from the Details page. From the Landscape view it appears his parents were just 15 & 12, respectively, when Ernest was born.
I generally avoid entering any approximate date, unless I am pretty sure the event took place within +/- 5 years of the year I input. In this specific example, it would probably have been better to omit "before" (or any) dates for the parents' births: certainly in knowing the possibility of Mary giving birth at 12 was actually rather unlikely.
I know others disagree with me, but I just don't see the purpose of entering totally unknown dates. Like the users that input "after 1910" for a death, just because the 1910 census is the last time the user has happened to find a date showing the individual was still alive! In one case, I found the person had actually died in 1948, so I don't see even showing "after 1910" in the Family Members section, or in a pedigree view page, would be of any help whatsoever in cases like that.
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I agree that "about" should indicate a range of less than a decade, but I disagree about "before" and "after": if the display could be relied upon to actually show that it's an upper or lower bound, then even a many-decade range is less than the full-century range that the lack of any date would indicate.
For example, there's a relative of my spouse who was still alive when his sister died in 1943, and I know from family recollection that he moved to Switzerland and died there probably in the 1960s or 70s, but the municipality where he was known to have lived does not have any records available online. Thus, what I know for certain is that his death occurred after 1943. That's enough to differentiate him from the same-named famous person who died in 1928, and also narrows the search range, if Switzerland should make death records available.
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So far I have seen the following in the comments:
- That the current misleading display is "customary" and "not unique to FamilySearch". If a custom is misleading to the point of being harmful, it should be discontinued regardless of wherever else the custom is followed.
- That the current misleading display can be avoided by not "entering any approximate date". This approach would only work consistently if NO ONE were allowed to enter an approximate date. Some other websites do not allow date modifiers according to one commenter. The person in favor of disallowing date bounds sees no value in placing upper or lower bounds on birth or death dates. I do see a value in it so I am not in favor of disallowing date bounds.
Maybe it would be best to NOT DISPLAY dates that have qualifiers if the qualifiers are not going to be shown along with the dates. That would be better than displaying WRONG information as is being done now.
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Paul W has commented unfavorably of the use of qualifiers (before, after, etc.) on dates. I think his unfavorable opinion is due almost entirely to the misleading (and unnecessary) visual effect resulting from it.
Upper and lower bounds on birth and death dates can be very valuable in research. FamilySearch provides very nice search tools for finding records and finding people in the tree. Those tools let you provide ranges for birth and death years.
[Unfortunately, the search tools also strip off the qualifiers on dates AND THEN ADD BACK THEIR OWN WRONG QUALIFIERS. That is fodder for another suggestion. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen by going to Samuel Purdy (G2HD-X5M) and then clicking FamilySearch under the "Search Records" heading. Samuel Purdy's birth is entered as "before 1853". However, the search tool comes up with a birth date range of "1851-1855". However, you can, and should, overwrite the search defaults.]
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I would like your feedback on this ALTERNATIVE to providing the "before" modifier to the year.
If a modifier (e.g., "before", "after") is provided on a date, and the modifier will not be displayed with the year, DO NOT DISPLAY the year. The image below shows how this may be done for the example provided initially. The question mark in an oval symbol could be a link such that the full date as entered by a user would be displayed when the cursor hovers over the symbol or clicks on the symbol. I think that not showing the year is better than showing a WRONG year. If there is positive feedback from people watching this thread, I will submit this idea as a new suggestion.
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